Bibby Financial Services has staff spread across multiple locations—the kind of dispersed workforce where people can go months without seeing colleagues from other offices. They wanted an internal app to bring people together: company news, team updates, social features, the kind of thing that makes you feel part of something bigger than your own desk.
MCM Creative Group brought us in to build it.
Six months of iterative development. We'd build a feature, get feedback, refine it, repeat. Employee engagement apps are tricky—get the tone wrong and nobody uses them, make them mandatory and people resent them.
The backend runs on Lumen, Laravel's micro-framework. It's lightweight and fast—perfect for a mobile API where every millisecond of response time matters. Push notifications, user authentication, content management, analytics—all handled server-side.
The app itself uses Ionic, which gave us a single codebase for both iOS and Android. The UI feels native enough that users don't think about the technology—they just scroll through company updates and team photos.
We built features progressively based on actual usage. Some things we expected to be popular weren't; some features we nearly cut became favourites. That's why iterative development matters.
The client called it an "unbelievable success"—which was nice to hear. More importantly, staff actually use it. The engagement metrics showed real adoption, not the forced usage you get when something is mandated from above.
Turns out, when you give dispersed teams a good way to connect, they want to.
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